After all, the 43-year-old University of Waterloo history professor with a pearly-white Donny Osmond grin was a teen in purple socks in the Mormon hub of Salt Lake City.

He’s a born-in-Calgary carnivore turned vegan. And a prizewinning wordsmith, whose first novel — which features an ice-cream loving Mormon detective out to solve a Salt Lake murder in 1930s Utah — is due to be published next fall.

He’s a Ronald Reagan buff who also grew up in California, where the late Great Communicator first governed, and a John Wayne fan with a Quiet Man demeanour.

But the son of a University of Utah economics professor did have a Mohawk for a six months of so.

“Luckily, no extant photos survive.”

His favourite bands? Dead Kennedys. Black Flag. D.O.A.

The father of two, and the winner of the 2011 Tony Hillerman Prize for best first mystery novel set in the southwest — a prize that gave him a $10,000 advance and a publisher for City of Saints — once met Kennedys crooner Jello Biafra.

Out of this potpourri of punk and purity stewing in Hunt’s cranium — which was also richly fed by a tween-age appetite for Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Ross Macdonald novels — comes Art Oveson.

Oveson is the Mormon detective dreamed up by Hunt to solve the real-life but largely forgotten murder of a wealthy socialite circa 1930. Yes, he’s a Mormon. No, he’s not a polygamist. But he is a true believer in the City of Latter-Day Saints.

Oveson always wears a Stetson and his adventures always leave it ruined.

Naturally, the character adores his ice cream

“Utah is a big ice cream state,” said Hunt, who made Utah-renowned Keeley’s the ice cream parlour of choice for Oveson.

“He’d settle for any kind of ice cream.”

A vanilla cone in one hand. Two scoops of murder and mayhem in the other.

The contrast is what fascinates Hunt, whose Mormon blood runs still beneath the placid exterior of a non-religious man with a PhD in history from the University of Utah.

That’s what City of Saints is all about. That’s what Salt Lake City is to Hunt.

“What it seems like on the surface and what’s really churning underneath,” he said.

Hunt, who has written non-fiction works in the past, experienced the dual nature of the Salt Lake scene during his two decades living in the city.

He remembers a dude in a devil suit who used to hang out around the Mormon Temple and tell people the end of the world was looming. The fellow called himself The Worm, and one day, Hunt struck up a conversation with him.

“He gave me his spiel about Satan coming,” Hunt recalled.

Satan in Salt Lake City? Where Donny and Marie are Mormon royalty? Seemed ridiculously out of place.

“On the surface, everything seemed normal,” Hunt said. “But a David Lynch-strangeness lurked beneath. So, I thought this is the perfect setting for a series of mystery novels.”

Maybe a series. Perhaps a movie one day.

Who might play Art Oveson on the silver screen? Hunt always had Joe Mazzello in mind for the role. He’s the young actor who outran Velicoraptors in Jurassic Park and recently turned up in The Pacific and The Social Network.